Nosh 42: 'Aquarius,' 'Fantastic Beasts' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Aquarius and Fantastic Beasts …

Aquarius
I’ve never seen a Brazilian movie that didn’t hold my interest, at least sensually. It’s true even in lesser films, and Aquarius is not lesser. Sonia Braga, 40 years after achieving sex-bomb fame in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, dominates beautifully. She plays her age (65 during filming), her face drawn, her body spare, but she still has the Brazilian sizzle, the erotically charged voltage of life.

Braga is Clara, retired music critic, widow, survivor of breast cancer, yet still basking in her great LP collection, still ready to dance among the young. She adores not only her family but her old (1940s era?) apartment on Avenida Boa Viagem (Good Voyage), which faces the sea in Recife. Brazil’s national motto is Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress), and “progress” nails a cruel order on Clara’s door – a kind of spiritual eviction notice.

A big-bucks developer is buying out residents, to erect another generic, high-rise condo phallus. Clara refuses the offer, wants to keep her beloved nest of memories, and soon hates the young, U.S.-trained real estate heir with his “shit-eating grin.” His money is insulting, and Clara won’t budge. Her tactics are agile, almost a Balanchine ballet of controlled rage.

Early this year I relished Kleber Mendonca Jr.’s Neighboring Sounds, a more meditative view of urban change (see Nosh 3, by scrolling below). Aquarius is a splendid confirmation that he is a top-deck talent. Remember how the intimate talks of Sally Field and Ron Leibman put a smart heart into the protest drama Norma Rae? Mendonca, a former journalist with a great eye, can do that. And also achieve terrific family scenes, subtle politics and suspense chills. He makes Clara’s mostly emptied structure as richly present as Hitchcock’s set-built, urban hive in Rear Window. He does this without laying on much rhetoric, and never makes Clara into a saint. She’s too humanly complicated for that.

Old Hitch, though daring, could never show feces, or mastectomy scars, or explicit sex (Clara’s retaliation to an invasive orgy by party animals is memorable). Aquarius is a spiced, bubbling soup of a movie, yet with some very subtle flavors. Braga’s career-capper role is supported by aces: Zoraida Coleto as a housekeeper, Irandhir Santos as a lifeguard, Thala Perez as an inspiring aunt. “We” have just elected our first landlord President, who might try to condo the Constitution. In the long, worried months ahead, a lot of us will need to find our inner Clara.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

My kids grew in close sync with the remarkable Harry Potter books and movies, and so I have a nostalgia both critical and personal. But commercial theme-parking started long ago, and the latest, gaudy symptom is Fantastic Beasts … In it, a piece of J.K. Rowling’s very English, creative mind lands like a meteor in 1920s New York. The meteor’s face is boyish little Eddie Redmayne, who always seems like a Dickens orphan and will, some day, make a great old character actor. He comes with a magical suitcase, to save the Apple from an evil master (finally revealed in a Johnny Depp cameo). Colin Farrell is the main villain, in a routine way, and a pudgy baker (Dan Fogler) represents ordinary people, cutely. Jon Voight is boring as a Kane-like publisher. Magical critters are many, yet not especially original, and the CGI effects are more effective than exciting. What’s gone is the intimate, living spine of the Potter heritage, those wonderful Hogwarts students, their great teachers and lovely British lands. This hectic, colorful show will surely do well. But this is franchising, a money empire spawning a profitable offspring. 

SALAD (A List)

Here are my Ten Favorite Brazilian Movies: Black Orpheus (Camus, 1959), Me You Them (Waddington, 2000), Aquarius (Mendonca, 2016), Pixote (Babenco, 1981), Waste Land (Walker and Jardim, 2010), Central Station (Salles, 1978), Neighboring Sounds (Mendonca, 2012), City of God (Mereilles and Lund, 2005), O Cangaceiro (Barreto, 1953), It's All True (Welles, 1942).                                                                    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles was working in Rio on his docu-vision It’s All True when he got a fretful letter from his pal, actor Joseph Cotten. About RKO chopping The Magnificent Ambersons in L.A.; the studio couldn’t understand his tough, dark, poetic movie. Welles: “Yes, exactly. That’s just exactly what I was making! (Cotten) had become, with the best will in the world, an active collaborator with (editor Robert) Wise and the janitor of RKO and whoever else was busy screwing it up.” Tragic, and his Brazilian film also felt the chopper. (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Playing the AIDS-afflicted Texas horndog Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club was a huge step for Matthew McConaughey, who in recent years had flaunted a genial, man-candy image in romantic comedies: “Mysterious AIDS was ‘the gay disease,’ and in Ron’s homophobic circle of chaw-and-guffaw studs it was the worst stigma. In summer 2012, the actor joined the New Orleans set, most excited to explore ‘the subject told from the point of view of a heterosexual man.’ He met Woodroof’s family, and Ron’s diary revealed a swaggering but insecure fantasist who lacked purpose before his illness and was self-destructive without it.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Marlon Brando and Karl Malden face a hard choice in One-Eyed Jacks (Paramount, 1961; director Marlon Brando, cinematographer Charles Lang).     

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 41: 'Arrival,' 'Christine' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Arrival and Christine

Arrival
The alien thing arrives in Arrival above the sweeping hills of Montana. Maybe faithful, Republican ranchers look up and think, “Lordy, let’s ask President Trump to build us a wall.” The un-earthlings (coming from where, for what?) are suspended some yards above ground in a huge craft, like an oval Magritte egg shelled in baked iron or basalt. In a smoggy haze they emerge as tall “heptapods” (seven standing tentacles). U.S. forces form a security base including a glass barrier, and the aliens flatten starfish-like digits on the glass to write in what look like circular spews of calligraphy. You’d think the Chinese, facing an alien ship near Shanghai, would have a cultural edge on translating this, but they start turning hostile.

Fortunately we have a genius linguist, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams). It is she who figures how to bridge the divide by deciphering the symbols. Her dear face is the best ambassador we could have. Without Adams, so subtle and emotionally open, Denis (Sicaria) Villeneuve’s big show would be out-to-sea on a desert planet. Math wiz Jeremy Renner backs Adams with his thoughtful hunkiness. Forest Whitaker is the gruff military brass, sternly by-the-book. We never quite grasp just how Banks interprets the alien signs. The movie’s vague, lofty concepts are, for many sci-fi fans, a literary load that lacks fireworks.

Adams is excellent, and some images are scary-special, but the aliens are so radically Other that it’s hard to imagine any kind of mutual future. Seeking humanization, the story fishes back to early scenes of Banks and her adorable daughter, a cancer patient. Dreams and memories blend into a murky elegy of family values, and the goo-goo is cosmic. Arrival remains fairly cerebral, and often visually oppressive. Bring back the radiant wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the oddball wit of Strange Invaders, the giddy satire of Mars Attacks!, the poetic surprises of Midnight Special.

Christine

Christine Chubbuck, a ’70s TV journalist, is not Mary Tyler Moore or Ron Burgundy or, for sure, Nicole Kidman’s Suzanne Stone in To Die For. In Christine she is just herself: lean and lonely, a virgin at 29, living with mom, stuck in a low-rated TV station in Sarasota, Florida, without even Teleprompters. Her boss Michael (superbly played by Tracy Letts) scorns her fiercely pursued but often dull contributions as a reporter. His new mantra is “If it bleeds, it leads,” and in response to that pulpy vision Christine provides. On July 15, 1974 , she kills herself “live,” on air, using a pistol. This is a reality-based story (unlike quite a lot of TV news), and Christine’s fateful decline parallels Richard Nixon’s downfall on big, important TV.

Director Antonio Campos and writer Craig Shilowich have made an absorbing, unpleasant but credible film. Chubbuck was no star, but Rebecca Hall stars with unerring focus, variety, detail and concentration of effect. The Brit (best known for Vicky Cristina Barcelona) nails down an American accent to wring every hurt,  angry, naggingly neurotic aspect of a woman who put an awful spin on feminist ambition. With fine period touches but no hint of nostalgia, Christine takes us deep into a shallow but human life. Finally, despondently, Christine made the news – her exit even helped inspire Paddy Chayefsky to write Network.

SALAD (A List)

The Best Space Visitors Movies, in order of arrival on our planet: The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960), The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978), Strange Invaders (Michael Laughlin, 1983), Starman (John Carpenter, 1984), Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996), Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997), Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols, 2016). And for all Earth kiddies: E.T. (Spielberg, 1982). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In his minor but enjoyable thriller The Stranger (1946), Orson Welles plays the Nazi fugitive Kindler, hiding out in a New England college town as Prof. Rankin, and married to sweet, clueless Loretta Young. When a character points out that defeated Germany had a liberal tradition, mentioning Karl Marx, Rankin fixes him with a Herr Professor gaze and gives away his hidden, chilling secret: “But Marx wasn’t a German. He was a Jew.”

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Nicole Kidman always had a stellar edge, including “a bonus factor: skyscraper elevation (5 feet, 11 inches). To the reporter Gaby Woods, she was like ‘a trick of perspective. When I meet her, she is draped over an anonymous hotel sofa … her glossy legs stretching out endlessly towards crocodile heels.’ The low point was at the press junket for Nine. Journalist: ‘You’re very tall in this film.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
                 

Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church, ready for wine in Sideways (Fox Searchlight 2004; director Alexander Payne, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 40: 'Doctor Strange' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Doctor Strange

The special, visual effects in Doctor Strange make it one of the  movies that pitch forward your sense of what modern, big-screen showmanship can be – films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Matrix and Avatar, also the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series. But this Marvel Comics fantasy’s appeal is not, at its core, tech-sourced. It stars a real star.

Anyone who saw Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet (the 2015 staging was also screened in theaters), or The Fifth Estate or his TV Sherlock Holmes, knows that here is a unique packet of talented charisma. With the oddest stellar features since Boris Karloff, the tall, long-faced Brit is adored by swarms of “Cumberbitches.” Now they will be joined by salivating squads of Cumberwitches, as he flaunts a buff physique and discards his CumberBond accent for American zingers that still drip his hauteur. Armed with the very special effect of himself, Cumberbatch centers a film that might otherwise fly off on giddy jolts like a cosmic pinball.

Dr. Stephen Strange is the perfect pompous surgeon, with “magical’ hands. But a car crash leaves his doctor digits as  wrecked as the pianist’s in The Hands of Orlac. Shattered, but with a robust, phallic ego to propel recovery, Strange leaves behind his yummy squeeze, medical colleague Christine (Rachel McAdams). He heads, of course, to the Fabled East. And finds, of course, the Ancient One.

That would be, of course, Tilda Swinton, whose DNA prepped this role since before birth. Head shaven to a glowing orb, Swinton is less an actor acting that an aura beaming. As she dispenses her riffs of silky-voiced wisdom, Swinton flies higher than Ken Kesey shagging Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

Inevitably there is much gassy, astral rhetoric about time, power, fate and death. The logic is pure Marvel, pure Comic-Con: mystical arts mean magical arts, which really mean martial arts. By now, we all know that the future is mainly about cool mayhem. Assisted by a humorless but funny librarian (Benedict Wong) and hunky-pensive guardian Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Strange combats the insane rebel warrior Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelson, who telegraphs his first name in every mad gesture).

For all I know, Strange is the spawn of Dr. Strangelove and Jayne Mansfield, born in a mine shaft after Kubrick’s atomic wipe-out in 1964. We’re so swept up in his giddy struggle, as New York folds and streams  in glassy, sliding visions of gonzo morphitecture, why bother about mere story sense?

It is an absorbing, lively spectacle, and a profitable peg on which His Cumberness can hang his rising star. Director Scott Derrickson and his ace team, uplifting elements pulped in 1978 by a Dr. Strange TV movie, support their fine cast by including smart bits and even dry wit. Look closely during one of the Big Apple’s immense origami convulsions. There sits a commuter, chortling. He is reading that prescient vision of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

SALAD (A List)

The dozen Best British Male Film Stars (and their best star films), in order of arrival: Charles Laughton (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Leslie Howard (Pygmalion), Laurence Olivier (Richard III), Roger Livesey (The Life and Death of Col. Blimp), James Mason (Odd Man Out), Stewart Granger (King Solomon’s Mines), Alec Guinness (The Horse’s Mouth), Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold), Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove),  Albert Finney (Shoot the Moon), Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia) and Michael Caine (Educating Rita). Note: Charles Chaplin and Cary Grant were, essentially, American stars.                

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles crowned the first great era of sound films (Citizen Kane, 1941). As a kid he had seen it beginning: “I went with my father to the world premiere of Warner’s first Vitaphone sound picture, which was Don Juan starring John Barrymore. It was really a silent with a synchronized sound track full of corny mood music, horse hooves, and clashing swords. But it was preceded by a few short items of authentic talkies – Burns and Allen, George Jessel telephoning his mother, and Giovanni Martinelli ripping hell out of Pagliacci. My father lasted about half an hour and then went up the aisle, dragging me with him. ‘This,’ he said, ‘ruins the movies forever.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Quentin Tarantino is the definition of modern fan-boy cultism and “garnished by academic ivy: panels, monographs, essays, a ricochet beautifully caught in Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Hill, where video savant Peter van Eder finds in the 1953 musical The Band Wagon ‘a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work’ and also a prophecy of Kill Bill. Such encrustations hardly make Tarantino an intellectual, but he is quite definitely a writer. ‘When I write my scripts,’ he told Charles McGrath, ‘it’s not really about the movie per se, it is about the page.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
                 

James Dean first reveals his movie power in East of Eden (Warner Bros., 1955; director Elia Kazan, cinematographer Ted McCord).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 39: 'The Dressmaker,' 'Nosferatu' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews, The Dressmaker and Nosferatu

The Dressmaker
When Burt Lancaster went to Italy to play the noble aristocrat of The Leopard, director Luchino Visconti (a real aristocrat) made a disparaging remark about a “cowboy actor.” The lavish production needed a world star, and the two men soon bonded, making a masterwork that includes perhaps Lancaster’s supreme performance (certainly his most subtle). England’s Kate Winslet became a world star with Titanic. She has done a lot of major work. But her leap Down Under to Australia, for Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker, is almost as embarrassing as Aussie-born Nicole Kidman going back for Australia, a national epic with the brain of a demented kangaroo.

Winslet stars as Tilly, a mature, chic seamstress who returns to the dreary, dusty hamlet that made her flee as a girl, falsely accused of a killing. Maybe she fled from the fake sets and agonizing close-ups. This is one of those stagey towns full of hayseeds hell-bent to be very local characters. The prime source is a novel by Rosalie Ham, and ham is robustly served as Moorhouse slathers on yokel yucks. When Tilly starts to win over the deprived women, each a slum of abandoned allure, by making them dresses in the swank style of Christian Dior (this is 1951), the effect is far more weird than funny. It is like watching God’s Little Acre attempt to become Funny Face.

The worst offender is Judy Davis as Tilly’s mother, a bent old stick with a nasty mouth. In one swoop of crazed local color she insults both Gloria Swanson (in Sunset Boulevard) and Billie Holiday (on record). Those of us who hoard bad movie memories will quickly recall another Davis – Bette – mugging up a schtick storm as Apple Annie in Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles. Meanwhile, trouper Winslet keeps trying to hold her dignity and return to the absurdly dubious plot. That includes her seduction by the town stud (Liam Hemsworth), a kind of muscle mattress or shining sperm bank of rural manliness.

This blast of corny, “hip” showmanship (imagine John Waters stripped of wit) was a big success in Australia, where subtle movies are often in short supply. But we Americans shouldn’t be too smug about it. Our multiplexes are crammed with loud junk, and (the Big Show) we are suffering the worst election since 1824, when John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson made our politics seem like a festival of fools.

Nosferatu

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is coming back into circulation, but that revival is pulp comedy next to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). It’s 94 years old, or in vampire terms, young. I saw it recently at Eugene’s delightful Bijou Art Cinema, a former church, with a band providing witty music. There is something churchy and even sick-sacred about Murnau’s silent vision (which for copyright reasons turned Dracula into Count Orlac; the production firm shut down to avoid a suit from Dracula novelist Bram Stoker’s widow). Nosferatu, which never dies, is like a ghostly X-ray of the “living dead” myth. In this solemn poem of fear, 19^th century Germano-Balkans live in shivering thrall to the cadaverous Orlac. Played as a kind of floating corpse by Max Schreck, he is like a bone siphoning blood.

The plot pace creaks a bit, but the images and special effects remain fresh from a beautiful, feverish, lunar nightmare. No wonder that Werner Herzog had to remake this picture in 1979 with his stellar kink-nut, Klaus Kinski. Murnau’s horror stems not from Halloween chills but Europe’s ancestral fear of plague, as Nosferatu’s swarming army of vermin invades a port city. This film still bites like a plague rat, incurably inhuman.

SALAD (A List)

My selection of Kate Winslet’s Ten Best Roles so far, in order:
Mildred in Mildred Pierce (2011), Hanna Schmitz in The Reader (2008), Rose DeWitt Bucater in Titanic (1997), Ruth in Holy Smoke! (1999), Sarah Pierce in Little Children (2006), Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Adele Wheeler in Labor Day (2013), Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995), Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures (1994), Tula in Romance and Cigarettes (2005).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A fringe of imperial purple came early to Citizen Welles, as during the 1938 Mercury Theater production of Danton’s Death. After a night rehearsal, he turned to actor and prop man John Berry “demanding chalk. Berry told him he didn’t know where to find chalk at two in the morning. ‘He looked at me with that wonderful, noble, aristocratic hauteur,’ recalled Berry. ‘He said, ‘Why? Must you betray me too, booby?’ Berry grabbed the fire ax, went downstairs to the men’s room, broke the wall, dug out some plaster, and came back and handed it to him. ‘Thank you,’ said Orson." Fortunately Berry didn’t apply the ax to Welles. (From Patrick McGilligan’s superb Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Eagerly I flew from Chicago to Los Angeles, for the press debut of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. A critic friend had tipped me off: this was no devotional rubbing of Raymond Chandler’s novel. It was ‘pure Altman.’ The balding Midwestern transplant with an old master’s spade beard seemed more daring at 48 than younger insurgents (Ashby, Bogdanovich, Coppola, De Palma, Mazursky, Scorsese, Spielberg etc.) M*A*S*H in 1970 had translated our Vietnam fiasco to Korea, with a liberating cackle. Pauline Kael wrote that ‘people laughed at the profanity. It felt good, like loosening your tie.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
     

            

Max Schreck is ready for work in Nosferatu (1922; director F.W. Murnau, cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner).

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.